Reporting Equity and Justice in Educational Accountability
Damian Betebenner
June 24th, 2025
Uh oh!
I was clueless!
Going back several years, I’d hear colleagues frequently using the term “equity” to characterize the work they were doing.
It seemed like a good thing. It’s not like I support inequity.
But in the end, I really didn’t know what it meant.
I’d heard about DEI programs and interventions that characterize themselves as equity-focused.
But those are inputs and I’m an outputs guy.
I was curious: How would one characterize/recognize and ultimately quantify equity in terms of the outputs we all know and love - state summative assessment results?
So what did I do? This was pre-ChatGPT so I started Googling.
Background
The Famous Infographic
This Gave Me Some Ideas – Here’s What I Saw
I saw the fence as a metaphor for the “proficiency” requirements and the individuals seeing over the fence as demonstrating proficiency.
I saw disparate proficiency outcomes represented by some individuals seeing over the fence and others not.
I saw Equality, where “input” boxes are of equal height, not eliminating proficiency disparities.
I saw Equity, where “input” boxes adjust in height to the need of the individual, leading to the elimination of proficiency disparities.
I felt like I was starting to get it.
Then I Read This!
Sippin the EquiTEA made some good points!
Making the children different heights implicitly blames the student for not being able to see over the fence.
The graphic doesn’t address the uneven playing field associated with the systemic inequities that exist in our society.
So I wanted to see if I could come up with a graphic that merges these ideas together.
Here’s What I Came Up With
I’m Not Saying
This is perfect or better than other illustrations.
This is original or the best way to think about these ideas.
It did, however, help me get some traction on how ideas like equity and justice could be quantified in terms of the outputs we all know and love - state summative assessment results.
That’s what I’m going to run with for the rest of this presentation.
Equity
Making Sense of Equity
The boxes represent the equity “contribution”.
The contribution includes, for example, supplemental learning interventions and supports to help students who are behind “catch up”.
The height of the boxes represents the magnitude of the contribution or, conversely, the magnitude of the inequity (academic headwinds) to overcome.
These contributions would manifest themselves as higher rates of growth (academic tailwinds) for those students.
The critical insight here is that student growth is the basis for investigating equity.
Student Growth as an Equity Indicator
To investigate equity vis-à-vis student growth, we need a measure of student growth that allows different groups to demonstrate different rates of growth.
If one only wants to make between group equity comparisons within a given year, then norm-referenced SGPs are sufficient.
If one want to investigate equity over time, for example, at the state level, then baseline referenced SGPs are required.
Visualization - Growth as an Equity Indicator
Visualization - Growth as an Equity Indicator
The mosaic plot depicts percentages of students demonstrating different levels of growth based upon the growth needed by the student.
Justice
Making Sense of Justice
The downward slope of the ground represents the myriad of systemic factors (many outside of the control of the education system) that impact student outcomes.
Equity, the boxes, represents what needs to be done to overcome these systemic disparities.
Justice entails the amelioration of the systemic factors that impact student outcomes.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Peter Drucker
Systemic Factors
The justice characterization as the amelioration of the systemic factors that impact student outcomes has a interpretation with regard to how some growth models work that is worth pointing out.
Often, we use demographic proxy variables to account for systemic factors that impact student outcomes.
Many value-added models incorporate individual and group level demographic characteristics to account for the impact of systemic factors on student outcomes.